Czech filmmaker Milos
Forman, whose American movies One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus won a
deluge of Academy Awards, including best director Oscars, died Saturday. He was
86.
Forman died about 2 a.m.
Saturday at Danbury Hospital, near his home in Warren, Connecticut, according
to a statement released by the former director's agent, Dennis Aspland. Aspland
said Forman's wife, Martina, notified him of the death.
When Forman arrived in
Hollywood in the late 1960s, he was lacking in both money and English skills,
but carried a portfolio of Czechoslovakian films much admired internationally
for their quirky, lighthearted spirit. Among them were Black Peter, Loves of a
Blonde and The Fireman's Ball.
The orphan of Nazi
Holocaust victims, Forman had abandoned his homeland after communist troops
invaded in 1968 and crushed a brief period of political and artistic freedom
known as the Prague Spring.
In America, his record as a
Czech filmmaker was enough to gain him entree to Hollywood's studios, but his
early suggestions for film projects were quickly rejected. Among them were an
adaptation of Franz Kafka's novel Amerika and a comedy starring entertainer
Jimmy Durante as a wealthy bear hunter in Czechoslovakia.
After his first U.S. film,
1969's Taking Off, flopped, Forman didn't get a chance to direct a major
feature again for five years. He occupied himself during part of that time by
covering the decathlon at the 1972 Olympics for the documentary Visions of
Eight.
Taking Off, an amusing look
at generational differences in a changing America, had won praise from critics
who compared it favorably to Forman's Czech films. But without any big-name
stars it quickly tanked at the box office.
Actor Michael Douglas gave
Forman a second chance, hiring him to direct One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest,
which Douglas was co-producing.
The 1975 film, based on Ken
Kesey's novel about a misfit who leads mental institution inmates in a revolt
against authority, captured every major Oscar at that year's Academy Awards,
the first film to do so since 1934's It Happened One Night.
The winners included Jack
Nicholson as lead actor, Louise Fletcher as lead actress, screenwriters Bo
Goldman and Lawrence Hauben, Forman as director and the film itself for best
picture.
The director, who worked
meticulously, spending months with screenwriters and overseeing every aspect of
production, didn't release another film until 1979's Hair.
The musical, about
rebellious 1960s-era American youth, appealed to a director who had witnessed
his own share of youthful rebellion against communist repression in
Czechoslovakia. But by the time it came out, America's brief period of student
revolt had long since faded, and the public wasn't interested.
Ragtime followed in 1981.
The adaptation of E.L. Doctorow's novel, notable for Forman's ability to
persuade his aging Connecticut neighbor Jimmy Cagney to end 20 years of
retirement and play the corrupt police commissioner, also was a disappointment.
Forman returned to top form
three years later, however, when he released Amadeus.
Based on Peter Shaffer's
play, it portrayed 18th century musical genius Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as a
foul-mouthed man-child, with lesser composer Salieri as his shadowy nemesis. It
captured seven Academy Awards, including best picture, best director and best
actor (for F. Murray Abraham as Salieri).
Hunting for locations,
Forman realized Prague was the only European capital that had changed little
since Mozart's time, but returning there initially filled him with dread.
His parents had died in a
Nazi concentration camp when he was 9. He had been in Paris when the communists
crushed the Prague Spring movement in 1968, and he hadn't bothered to return
home, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1975.
The Czech government,
realizing the money to be made by letting Amadeus be filmed in Prague, allowed
Forman to come home, and the public hailed his return.
"There was an enormous
affection for us doing the film," he remarked in 2002. "The people
considered it a victory for me that the authorities had to bow to the almighty
dollar and let the traitor back."
Never prolific, Forman's
output slowed even more after Amadeus, and his three subsequent films were
disappointments.
Valmont (1989) reached
audiences a year after Dangerous Liaisons, both based on the same French novel.
The People vs. Larry Flynt
(1996) was an ill-advised attempt to paint the Hustler magazine publisher as a
free-speech advocate.
Man on the Moon, based on
the life of cult hero Andy Kaufman, did win its star, Jim Carrey, a Golden
Globe. But it also failed to fully convey Kaufman's pioneering style of offbeat
comedy or the reasons for his disdaining success at every turn.
Jan Tomas Forman, born in
Caslav, Czechoslovakia, was raised by relatives after his parents' deaths and
attended arts school in Prague.
The director's first
marriage, to actress Jana Brejchova ended in divorce. He left his second wife,
singer Vera Kresadlova, behind with the couple's twin sons when he left
Czechoslovakia. He married Martina Zborilova in 1999. They also had twin sons.
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